Listen to the music: It’s as easy to learn as your ABC

9092013

Oy, what a mess.

I have arranged and re-arranged and re-arranged yet again (and again and again. . .) how I organize my cds. When they were still all in their jewel cases they were kept on a homemade cd rack; to find a cd meant scanning the shelves.

I’d always kept the pop and classical & opera cds apart, but went back and forth on where to put the blues and jazz cds, as well as the soundtracks. Sometimes I’d mix them all together, sometimes I’d keep the blues and jazz separate, sometimes the blues stayed with the pop while the jazz occupied its own space.

This was a manageable problem when I had a couple of hundred cds, but as that doubled (and then trebled), I kept messing with the order. I’d create categories (pop-blues-jazz-world music-soundtracks-electronica-compilations) then wonder what to do with a jazz soundtrack (e.g., Kansas City) or electronic world music (Finnish Ambient Techno Chant). At one point I separated out all of the women—which did not work. At all.

Once I got rid of the jewel cases and moved the cds into boxes—I never wanted to do the sleeves thing, both because I wanted to keep the cd “covers” & inserts and because I didn’t want to keep shifting everything every time I added a cd or decided to reorganize—I kept at the rearranging and sorting and segregating, even though it made less sense to do so once I realized it was easier to print out a list of all of my cds than flip through them looking for a particular artist or band.

Still, I kept to a basic schema of pop/blues-soundtracks-jazz and classical (which, of course, did not jibe with the organization of the printouts). The problem with this organization, however, was that I almost never listened to anything that wasn’t pop-blues: it was the bulk of my collection, I knew it best, so when I’d flip through the cds, I’d start with the pop and never go beyond that.

Thus the mess: This past summer I simplified the non-classical side, tossing everything all together. This has been great, actually, as I make my way more-or-less alphabetically through my collection—I hear more in the mix-up—but has temporarily wrecked my record-keeping of this “listen-to-the-music” venture.

It should be (mostly) smoothed out in the next round, but this one? Oy.